Livia Franchini​Emerging writer from Italy

'Sometimes it feels like ventriloquism, as if another language has given me another way of looking at things. I’m no longer capable of looking with my own eyes.'

Livia Franchini (1987) is a writer and translator from Tuscany, Italy who works in English and Italian. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, where she graduated as runner-up for the Margaret Hewson Prize in 2013, and is working towards a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, investigating the intersection between feminist praxis and formal experimentation in the works of Virginia Woolf, Anna Kavan and Lydia Davis. She is an associate fellow of the Academy of Higher Education, currently teaching Creative Writing at City Lit.

Selected publications include The Quietus, 3:AM, The White Review, LESTE, Hotel and the anthologies On Bodies (3 of Cups) and Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press). Livia has translated Natalia Ginzburg, Sam Riviere, James Tiptree Jr. and Michael Donaghy among many others, and has read and performed from her work widely, in the U.K. and internationally. Notable readings include Faber Social, Global City at the Southbank Centre, The European Poetry Festival, Standon Calling, Lowlands and The Free Verse Poetry Fair. Her work has been featured in Esquire, GQ, Review 31 and Minima & Moralia, among others.

In 2016 Livia co-founded CORDA, a journal about friendship in the time of new borders, and since 2017 she has been coordinating The Goldsmiths Prize, awarded to works of fiction that “open up new possibilities for the novel form”. She is one of the founding members of FILL - Festival of Italian Literature in London, where she lives. Livia is currently working on her first English-language novel Shelf Life, which will be published by Doubleday in the UK in August 2019 and by Mondadori in Italy in 2020.

Livia Franchini was born in Italy, but left when she was 19. A decisive moment, at a decisive age. ‘Of course I fully mastered Italian at the age of 19. But it’s only in your twenties that a language becomes layered, that you master a language in all its different forms and settings.' She has become proficient at a language that isn’t hers. She’s aware of that, she says. ‘Sometimes it feels like ventriloquism, as if another language has given me another way of looking at things. I’m no longer capable of looking with my own eyes. That’s fucked up, but hey, maybe it’s good to have that objective perspective. Maybe it’s good.'